3 ms·
You start letting the tail wag the dog when you start from the assumption you are testing stuff which must have a significant benefit, and ask how you can bette
by uvdiv 14y ago
You start letting the tail wag the dog when you start from the assumption you are testing stuff which must have a significant benefit, and ask how you can better demonstrate that benefit - rather than accepting that the results appear to show that the benefit is not particularly statistically significant.
There is no such bias in this method. It could just as easily show a drug to be worse than a placebo (harmful) than better: there is no prior assumption in either direction. The method merely increases the accuracy of this result.
The fact that it increases the number of positive drug outcomes is a good thing: we want more working drugs. Hiding drug effects with weaker tests, giving more inconclusive results, is not an advantage.